This is, no doubt, a far from rare mood in poetry. Even the waltz-songs of the music-halls express, or attempt to express, the longing of lovers for an impossible loneliness. Mr. de la Mare touches our hearts, however, not because he shares our sentimental day-dreams, but because he so mournfully turns back from them to the bitterness of reality:
No, no. Nor earth, nor air, nor fire, nor deep
Could lull poor mortal longingness asleep.
Somewhere there Nothing is; and there lost Man
Shall win what changeless vague of peace he can.
These lines (ending in an unsatisfactory and ineffective vagueness of phrase, which is Mr. de la Mare’s peculiar vice as a poet) suggests something of the sad philosophy which runs through the verse in Motley. The poems are, for the most part, praise of beauty sought and found in the shadow of death.
Melancholy though it is, however, Mr. de la Mare’s book is, as we have said, a book of praise, not of lamentations. He triumphantly announces that, if he were to begin to write of earth’s wonders:
Flit would the ages
On soundless wings
Ere unto Z